EPA’s clean power fraud

The Environmental Protection Agency has twisted 280 words in the Clean Air Act into 2,690 pages of Clean Power Plan regulations and appendices. The Clean Power Plan requires that states slash their utility-sector carbon dioxide emissions an average of 32% below 2005 levels by 2030.

At least 12 states will have to impose 40% to 48% reductions. Those states now get 50% to 96% of their electricity from coal, and nearly all their electricity from coal and natural gas. Further complicating matters, even replacing coal-fired units with natural gas turbines is highly restricted under the plan.

Replacing this power generation with wind and solar will disrupt grid reliability, risk brownouts and blackouts, and bankrupt many businesses, families, and communities.

Coal-reliant states currently pay 8 to 9 cents per kilowatt-hour. Their rates will likely go well beyond the 15 to 17 cents per kilowatt-hour that families, hospitals, factories, schools, and businesses now pay in “green energy” states such as California and Connecticut. They could skyrocket to the 36 to 40 cents that Germans and Danes are paying — or 70 to 80 cents when taxpayer subsidies are included.

The EPA claims more taxpayer-financed energy subsidies will help the poorest families. What about everyone else?

Millions of workers will lose their jobs, leaving more families destitute and welfare-dependent. Many will have to choose between buying food and gasoline, paying the rent or mortgage, visiting doctors, giving to charities, or saving for retirement. Those still working will pay for everyone else.

Families will face sleep deprivation, greater stress and depression, and more drug and alcohol abuse, spousal and child abuse, and theft and robbery. Nutrition and medical care will suffer. More people will have strokes and heart attacks. More will die prematurely or commit suicide. More elderly people will perish from hypothermia, because they cannot afford to heat their homes properly.

Sprawling wind and solar installations and transmission lines across millions of acres of wildlife and scenic areas will kill millions of eagles, hawks, and other birds and bats.

These are among the reasons Congress has rejected nearly 700 climate bills. The Clean Power Plan is the result of the EPA colluding regularly with radical environmentalist pressure groups and circumventing our legislative process, laws and Constitution.

The EPA also uses a “social cost of carbon” scheme that places arbitrary, inflated costs on damages it claims result from carbon-based fuels disrupting Earth’s climate. The agency includes every imaginable cost of using hydrocarbon energy — but ignores even the most important and obvious benefits of using those fuels.

The Clean Power Plan also ignores the real world outside the EPA’s windows. Contrary to climate model predictions, global temperatures haven’t budged in 18 years, and no Category 3, 4, or 5 hurricane has hit the United States in nearly a record 10 years. Moreover, slashing America’s CO2 emissions, destroying jobs and impairing human welfare will prevent less than 0.03 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming 85 years from now.

These totalitarian green decrees are fraudulent, illegal and unconstitutional. They severely impair the rights of people to enjoy affordable, reliable energy and the quality jobs, living standards, health and welfare such energy brings.

We must demand debate on every aspect of climate and energy issues — and honesty, transparency, and accountability in all regulatory processes. There is no room for fraud and deceit.

States should refuse to comply with the Clean Power Plan. Elected officials, presidential candidates and citizen groups should speak out loudly, clearly and often — and begin curbing the excessive power and representation of extreme environmentalists and bureaucrats in our government.

Congress and the courts must end the constant collusion and sue-and-settle lawsuits between the EPA and radical pressure groups. Congress must cut agency budgets, especially the billions of dollars the EPA and other agencies give to anti-energy advocacy organizations and rubber-stamping advisory panels.

Congressional committees and our next President must subject secret data, computer codes, models, and studies to full review by independent experts — to determine which assertions, policies, and regulations are reasonable and legitimate, and which are based on serious error, deceptive claims, or outright fraud.

During this review process, they should suspend and defund implementation of regulations and programs that raise serious questions about honesty and validity. Rules and programs ultimately found to be based on junk science, doctored data, collusion, or concocted evidence should be terminated — and agency personnel who have engaged in deceptive or fraudulent practices should be penalized or fired.

We must ensure that regulatory agencies and their advisory councils become more honest and transparent; represent a broader spectrum of expertise, viewpoints, and interests than they do now; fully assess evidence for and against alleged “dangerous man-made climate change”; and carefully evaluate the impacts of regulatory actions on jobs, living standards, health, and welfare.

Congress and states must reassert their legislative roles, restore federalism and separation of powers as the foundation of our American system, and address the extreme deference that courts too often give “agency discretion.”

These steps will be opposed by President Obama, many Democrats,and members of the climate crisis and renewable energy complex.

However, these actions are essential if the United States is to have an economic and employment revival, and poor, minority, and blue-collar families are to be protected from regulatory excess and unaccountable ruling elites.

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3 Comments

Mervyn
September 3, 2015 at 6:58 AM

By now it ought to be evident that President Obama is not a traditional American who believes in the American way, and in the American dream and in American exceptionalism. He has no sympathy for the lot of the American people. He has even apologised to the Arab world for America’s greatness (in his Cairo Speech).

All that matters to Obama is that America must sacrifice its freedom, democracy, market economy and prosperity at the coming Paris Climate Conference to save the world from climate change. He is determined that an international agreement to control fossil fuel energy, and ban it from 2100, is signed in December, thus giving the green light to implement the UN’s AGENDA 21 and eliminate capitalism as part of the ‘new world order’.

Obama is using the EPA to effectively show the world that the US Congress might be against action on climate change, but he is not … and his EPA regulations will do what is necessary, whether Americans like it or not.

But then… why should Obama care when his agenda has been one of weakening America in ways that the founders of the nation must be turning in their graves.

cshorey
September 7, 2015 at 10:11 PM

By now it should be obvious that being exceptional is not always a good thing (e.g. when a good proportion of our country’s population rejects climate science, that is not an exceptionalism that will help our country’s future.) Both the EPA and the Clean Air Act were set up during a Republican administration. This “liberal agenda” rhetoric is very misguided.

The Driessen exposé on the Clean Power Plan effectively states the damages , but it doesn’t go far enough. Hidden in the words “unreliable” and “intermittent”, usually used for solar and wind electricity, is a fatal flaw: solar and wind generate only part-time power. Solar is obviously less than half-time; one need only look out the window. Wind requires observation and measurement. A 300-turbine wind farm on 10,000 acres (about 16 square miles) generates its 750 megawatts of nameplate-rated output typically about one-third of the time.

Storage is the holy grail that will make solar and wind into full-time alternatives to burning coal and natural gas. But storage will at least double the required size of wind farms because their outputs must power the immediate load when the wind is blowing and at the same time place power into storage to be drawn upon when wind decreases and stops. Storage for solar is even more demanding than for wind, except in sunny states like Arizona. Solar storage of as much as five times immediate load may be required to accommodate a likely sequence of cloudy or stormy days when the sun fails to appear.

Never mind that today and in the near future, we don’t have utility-scale storage. We know how to pump water into reservoirs, where reservoirs exist. We can store air pressure in salt domes, where they exist and don’t leak. We can even store molten salt, but it isn’t welcomed in every neighborhood. Batteries aren’t a solution at utility scale.

The Clean Power Plan anticipates 200 gigawatts (200,000 megawatts) of wind output by 2030. The Plan is silent on part-time, and what it will take to achieve full-time substitution of coal and gas generation. The facts are that it will take a total of at more than 40,000 existing and additional turbines, covering a total area about the size of New York state, to generate part time. The invention of utility-scale storage with the goal of full-time output will require adding at least 40,000 more turbines for another 200 gigawatts of wind output in an additional area the size of New York state. Solar, whether photovoltaic or thermal, will face even larger expansions of facilities to provide for storage.